


Hours

by rosemtylr



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, ambiguously one sided isaac/allison, gerard gets dead, isaac centric, my love for isaac is obvious, no scratch that it's all isaac angst., scallison if you squint, this is basically just isaac angst, witches fix everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 11:52:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3809392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosemtylr/pseuds/rosemtylr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isaac doesn't know how he's doing it, how he's staying so nonchalant and has the emotional capacity to compartmentalize this grief to the point he can do a fucking crossword puzzle. It's mind boggling. All the teenager wants to be doing right now is laying in his bed and pretending his life is just a fucked up nightmare; that he's going to wake up with HER hair tickling his nose and HER body tucked against his...</p><p>...And HER father is sitting there, trying to figure out a five letter word for 'cheers' (when he helpfully points out it's 'roars' he get another death glare).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hours

**Forty hours** after _SHE_ dies, Isaac Lahey's claws are digging into the armrests of an uncomfortable commercial airplane seat, on a red eye to France with _HER_ father. Claustrophobia on the ground had been one thing, but in a metal death trap suspended over the Atlantic ocean? Chris should consider himself lucky that it's just the seat being treated to the beta special and do his crossword puzzle in peace instead of nudging him and shooting him the patented Argent death glare. Isaac doesn't know how he's doing it, how he's staying so nonchalant and has the emotional capacity to compartmentalize this grief to the point he can do a fucking crossword puzzle. It's mind boggling. All the teenager wants to be doing right now is laying in his bed and pretending his life is just a fucked up nightmare; that he's going to wake up with _HER_ hair tickling his nose and _HER_ body tucked against his. And _HER_ father is sitting there, trying to figure out a five letter word for 'cheers' (when he helpfully points out it's 'roars' he get another death glare). For some reason, they're going to France, and Isaac doubts it's a simple vacation; not when _SHE_ is still sitting on ice in the hospital's morgue, funeral unplanned and autopsy forgone at Chris' request. The Argent patriarch had refused any sort of explanation, just shoving a suitcase and a passport (the information is fake, which he finds wholly unnecessary) into his chest and leading him out the door of the apartment, telling him absolutely nothing other than their destination.

 

 **Forty eight hours** after _SHE_   tells another boy that _SHE_ will always love him, they're standing outside the gates of what looks to be an abandoned mansion in Bordeaux, the gates rusted and twisted by time and weather. Chris marches up to them like he owns the place (and maybe he does, for all Isaac knows), shooting the lock off with a gun Isaac didn't know was on his person (or how long, and he starts to question airport security with his normal dry sense of humour before he remembers _SHE_ stopped breathing two days ago and the humour seeps out of him, leaving him feeling heavier than ever). By the time they make it up the gravel drive, choked with weeds and bordered by overgrown trees, there is a woman sitting on a broken, drained fountain, outside and waiting for them. His heart feels like it's going to drop into his stomach and fall out of him completely, because from a distance the girl looks just like _SHE_ did, but as they get closer the differences are more noticeable. This girl is shorter, her jaw less defined and eyes a startling clear hue that he can't determine (green? blue? it's somewhere in between, he decides), not the warm brown that radiated kindness and emotion with ease. Her skin is dusted with freckles, so many freckles; _HERS_ had been alabaster and flawless. It's the little details that Isaac is thankful for, because the brown curls cascading over this woman's shoulders look like the ones that had been on the pillow next to him less than a week earlier.

 

“Chris.” Her voice is barely accented, which is odd, but Isaac is used to odd. She's obviously a relative, the familiarity and what he thinks might even be happiness (she's hard to read, which makes him bank on the relative card even more) in her tone telling. Then her brow creases and her eyes skim right over him, trying to find the missing piece. Then she asks about _HER_.

 

 _...Oh_.

 

Isaac's skin crawls when he hears Chris Argent begin to cry; not the teary eyes and thick voice he'd heard in the apartment, but sobs, howls that rivalled his own, and a mess of tears that soak the shoulder of the shell shocked looking brunette whose face is ashen and eyes unfocused. On the car ride to the airport, he learns her name is Margeurite. She is a cousin, Chris' dead brother's daughter who used to look after her grandmother until the old woman died, leaving a twenty four year old girl with a family fortune and a broken down estate. What he doesn't understand is why she has yet to shed a tear, just drives as Chris stares out the window with an angry glint in her eyes and determination lining her face, a deceptively heavy carpet bag with unknown contents sitting innocently next to him and the suitcases that had originally inhabited the backseat area.

 

 **Fifty five hours** after he realizes _SHE_ was never his, not really, they're flying first class, which is a hell of a lot nicer than commercial, so he manages to stop himself from ripping the seat to shreds. Margeurite (she offers no shortened version that's less of a mouthful, he's too afraid of her and her cold eyes to ask) notices the claws, and her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline, but she says nothing, instead searching furtively through an ancient looking book for something. He doesn't ask, isn't sure he wants to know what's going on but at the same time is burning with curiosity and a thousand questions, and imagining the cabin slowly shrinking, trapping him and suffocating him as they plunge to their deaths in icy cold waters off the coast of Maine - but she's an Argent and it doesn’t look like she wants to cut him in half once they land for being a werewolf (yet), so he lets her read, stares with terror and dismay down at the black water silently. 

 

 **Sixty hours** after _SHE_ bleeds out in the arms of the boy _SHE_ really loved, Scott is yelling at him. It isn't his Alpha yell; he looks too tired and broken for that one. This yell is all friend, all worry, and desperately hoarse, like he's been howling since Isaac trapped the fly in the Nemeton box. Isaac doesn't doubt he has been. He's at the McCall house while Margeurite and Chris are off on some ridiculous errand they refused to tell him about, practically throwing him out on the curb, not bothering to stop the car (it hurts; not his body hitting the pavement at thirty miles an hour, but the abandonment by the man who he'd started to think could renew his faith in father figures) Isaac doesn't want to look Scott in the eye; he had made that mistake once since _SHE_ died, and he had seen what he could only imagine a man burning from the inside out looked like. The agony had hurt him, not because he was his alpha or his friend, but because Isaac didn't feel that way, didn't feel that overwhelming sense of loss; just hollow. It made him realize he didn't love _HER_ like Scott had, like Scott did, and that he probably never would. He did find some consolation in the fact that he's pretty sure no one ever loved anyone as much as they had loved each other, but it had been so nice to have someone want him back, even if he had been a second choice. He wouldn't have minded, being a second choice; it was better than not being a choice at all, especially with _HER_.

 

 **Sixty one hours** after the katana ruins _HER_ coat and _HER_ body, Margeurite and Chris reappear looking worse for wear; he is grim and she is not, which is a change. In fact, she looks positively giddy. Isaac smells the blood before he sees it, just a few flecks on her cheek, and his stomach twists because blood shouldn't be that color; blood shouldn't be black. Scott says the name before he can, and Margeurite's eyes harden and the smile, becomes colder, smaller, _triumphant_. Something tells Isaac that she has slayed one of her demons today, figuratively and literally.

 

 **Sixty two** **hours** after _SHE_ dies saving his life, he finds out  _HER_ cousin is a _witch_ with a dead werewolf boyfriend, a dead werewolf baby, and a score against her grandfather that has finally been settled. The proof is in a ziplock bag in her purse, a heart with black woven through it. Scott and Chris look just as pleased as she did, underneath the grief lining their faces, and Isaac is a little bit more afraid of the two of them for it. He watches silently as the three of them speak about spells and rituals and he doesn't realize what's happening, why he was on another continent for less than five hours and why this small woman with white fire in her eyes is with them, until the moment she mentions the blood sacrifice. Blood for blood. This cousin isn't here to help heal a grieving father, to cook meals and do laundry and pretend not to hear the sobs in the middle of the night – she's a witch and she's here to bring her cousin back like she couldn't bring her lover or child back.

 

He has to sit down to process, and suddenly feels more constricted in Scott's living room than he'd ever felt in a freezer.

 

 **Sixty four hours** after _HER_ eyes close, tears still tracking down _HER_ paling cheeks, he is staring down at _HER_ corpse, skin whiter than the lilies his mother used to keep in her garden, before she died and his dad drank and his brother shipped out and came home in a box. There is a peace present in HER face that he hadn't seen in months, and he starts to wonder if this is really the way things should be. Everyone they knew died. Everyone they loved died. Maybe being dead wasn't as bad as it was cut out to be, not if it could smooth the pucker that had taken residence between _HER_ brows since the night _HER_ mom died. _SHE_ looks infinitely younger, smaller in death as _HER_ father lifts her body, carrying it to the car where Scott and Margeurite will be waiting. Isaac just stands guard, watching the door Stiles is not posted at and wondering why no one has bothered to find Lydia and tell her that her best friend was maybe going to come back to life. He's flipping through the contacts on his phone as they drive, refusing to acknowledge the cadaver in the trunk that used to be _HER_ , when he realizes it might be better if Lydia didn't know about the chance of getting _HER_ back, not based on her initial reaction. Isaac wouldn't fault her for it, wouldn't dream of it; for everything he could say about _HER_ and Scott, he knew Lydia would always be _HER_ first choice for anything, over anyone, come hell or high water.

 

False hope would drive Lydia over an edge he wasn't sure she could survive.

 

When they reach the Beacon Hills Preserve, he knows instinctively where they're going, can feel it's pull deep in his bones despite never seeing it in his life. The Nemeton is as powerful and intoxicating as he had feared it would be, and the overwhelming way it draws him in leaves him chilled, reminds him of the future they will have to face with new Alpha packs and Nogitsune and a slew of other supernatural monsters. His life is a fucking _genre_ now. A horrific one, he concludes as they lay HER prone body across the tree's cut trunk, feels a little nauseous when he sees how freely her limbs sway, like a marionette with it's strings cut. When Margeurite begins rummaging through the bag and lighting fires, he turns away, certain this is something he doesn't want to see. For once, he can admit that Stiles had the right idea, hiding out in his Jeep at the entrance to the woods, no doubt to keep Derek from interfering (which he definitely would, because a) his werewolf sense would be tingling now that there was a new Argent in town and b) he was a generally nosey person, for all his 'aloofness'). When he hears the squelch of what he somehow knows is a knife cutting through Gerard's severed heart, his chest tightens and breath comes in short, shallow gasps. He is on the verge of shifting, a lack of control he thought he had dominated suddenly consuming him, making his whole body vibrate with anxious energy. Margeurite is speaking in a language he's never heard before, what he can only guess is Latin, and a breeze begins to rustle through the trees.

 

He's only seventeen. He never asked for this life. He wants his mother.

 

 **Sixty five hours** after he hears _HER_ heart stutter before falling silent, he hears it flutter back to life; irregular at first, but steady after a few minutes. He can taste Chris Argent's tears on the wind. Margeurite's eyes cloud with pain, masking the fatigued exuberance before they clear quickly, never letting her true emotions play over her features unless they've been approved. When he hears Scott's voice, breathless and in awe, choked with emotion, he thinks he will be okay. He will be able to handle this reunion, has already seen the opposite situation play out and survived it. Then he sees _HER_ hair fan across _HER_ shoulders as _SHE_ sits up and knows he won't be able to get over this one. Not really. Not ever. When he hears _HER_ name, a name he'd sworn off less than three days ago, for the first time since _SHE_ died and then rose again, it's spoken with all the reverence he'd never articulated the first time around, and it falls from his lips.

_"Allison."_

 

 

 


End file.
